Organizing Larger Projects?

I know this will change with 2013, but I still have many months ahead of me using 2012.

Most of my projects have been small TV finishes for the most part - one or 2 spots, and handful of versions (60/30/15), and HD & SD deliverables.

I finally understand how the Library/Desktop relationship works, but it still doesn't feel very intuitive or natural to me. I'm about to start a project with finishing around a dozen 3 minute films, and a dozen TV spots, sharing lots of the same footage & graphics, and many versions of each one. When you add in all of the different versions that will be delivered, it will be around 60-80 different outputs.

I'm not sure what the best way to organize things is - different Libraries per film, with a shared footage library? Different Record Areas for each version, but keep everything in a Default Library?

My issue with the different libraries is that I find it incredibly annoying to manually save off each "area" to the proper library - I have a many-year habit of "Save All" or or Save Project reflexively, and when I quickly jump over to the left and click save area/replace, I'm unintentionally making tons of copies of the record areas in the other libraries - and it's a P-I-T-A to figure out which one is the most recent.

Someone told me they make a new library for each day, and just save off each day's work. That sounds terrible - digging through 2 weeks worth of libraries, looking for something?

I know there's lots of ways to do it, but wondering if you more experienced users have already worked this out.

Does anyone have a "best practices" guide they'd be willing to share or point me to?

I keep everything in one library. If the project becomes to large, and you have to be careful because you'll run into problems if you let the library get to big, I'll create another library and move things from one to the other. In other words, my main library may be "Work_In_Progress" and as it grows I move rough cuts or builds to another library called "Rough_Cutz". Often times, when I'm done w/FTG and working on finish, I'll create a new library called "CLIPS" and move them out of my main WIP library. Yes, you are correct, if not vigilante you'll start saving and before you know it, you filled up the wrong library.

I don't see Autodesk doing anything different as it makes sense to have additional libraries. Perhaps adding tabs would be of benefit sort of like FCP and tabbing between projects. Thanks for bringing this up as my hope is to retire FCP7 and do everything in Smoke 2013.

I tend to use folders with the date and include everything in the project in the folder...that way you a history of the previous days, and you can save everything with one click/overwrite to your library.

I also use record timelines for each cutdown. So Promo_30 would be the record timeline name, and then all my versions would be clips inside of that called Promo_30_V1, Promo_30_V2 Final HD/SD, etc

One negative about the folders is that you loading everything to the editdesk, which for what you are working on is overkill.

I take it your project has 12 individual films, each with cutdowns? I would probably make a library for each 3 minute film, folder for each days changes, record timeline for the master film/revisions, and record timelines for the cutdowns. Source areas for audio mixes, graphics, etc. This would keep everything together as if it were its own project. Depending on how much overlap there is on the conform, I'd keep the footage in each library, or make a master library to relink to.

The project got simplified a bit, as all of the delivery dates got moved on top of each other, so I'm at least able to offload the TV finishes to another facility - so it's quite bit more manageable now - just the short films (reduced to 8, most with only one version).

I doubt I'll have any brilliant insights, but if I do - I'll reply again with the solution that worked for me.